


The Productions of Time

by Balder12



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angels, Angst, Character Study, Immortality, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 03:53:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Balder12/pseuds/Balder12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel thinks about time, and Dean, and what he's going to do when Dean's time runs out</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Productions of Time

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a line in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake: "Eternity is in love with the productions of time."

For millions of years, Castiel had come to this place to think. He found it soothing to stand at the bottom of the ocean. The shadows of rays and sharks passed over his head, just as they had hundreds of millions of years ago, before the dinosaurs roamed the earth.  
  
To the eye, this place was unchanged from the days before the fall of Lucifer, when Castiel could spend the length of a human generation here in reflection, and scarcely remark on it. The ear, however, told a different story. For eons, the bottom of the ocean had been all but silent, only the occasional thrash of a dying fish reaching him across the miles. Then, recently, as Castiel counted such things, the great mammals returned to the water that their ancestors crawled out of millions of years before. Their songs had echoed across hundreds of miles, turning the ocean into a cathedral for their eery choir. Castiel had not minded. Indeed, he’d thought it was rather beautiful. Now, though, humans had asserted their presence in the oceans, as they had everywhere else, and the roar of boats was inescapable, drowning out the whales and sporadically shattering Castiel’s stream of thought.  
  
And yet Castiel returned, over and over, as if he might find here the inner peace that he’d left behind him forever on the floor of Hell when he’d gripped Dean’s soul. He found nothing, though, but a heightened sense of anxiety. He dared not come here these days without looping some part of his consciousness around Dean to tether himself to human reality. He feared that, lost in thought, he might awake only to find that Dean was an old man, that Castiel had squandered what little time they had together.  
  
Angels have no instinctual sense of time. Castiel could keep track of it with conscious effort–when Dean told him to be somewhere in four hours, he was there in four hours, accurate as any atomic clock–but he didn’t feel its passage in his bones the way that humans did. Dean seemed to believe that Castiel was being deliberately enigmatic when he responded to a question like, “When did Sam call?” with “Earlier,” but that was truly all that Castiel knew. The only times that he viscerally understood were Now and Not Now.  
  
Even after living primarily on earth for as long as he had, the rapid-fire pace of the human world felt alien and wrong. He’d been watching Dean and Sam for years, and the rat-a-tat of their banter, the subtle interchange of their looks and gestures, was still a frantic dance that he couldn’t begin to imitate. At best, a quarter of what they said was utter nonsense to him, lost in the fast, incomprehensible rhythm of their interactions. With humans he knew less intimately, it was more like a third. He was aware that this was a source of amusement for the brothers, but he struggled in vain to dance the right steps, always awkward and ridiculous, out of time with a meter that only they could hear.  
  
With every day that Castiel spent at Dean’s side, he became more acutely aware of the free-fall of time that constituted a human life. Each passing minute sent Dean plunging faster toward an inevitable end. Once, this hadn’t mattered so much to Castiel; mortal death had only been a blessed transition to a different and better existence.  
  
Now, though, with a failed coup of God’s throne behind him, Castiel knew that he could never safely return to Heaven. When Dean died, he was gone, and they would be separated forever. He tried to console himself with the notion that Dean would, at long last, be happy, even if Castiel wouldn’t be there to see it, but he found it hard to swallow. Every time he pictured Dean in Heaven, he saw his soul imprisoned like a bird in a cage, beating its life out against the bars.  
  
And as for Castiel, what would he do, then? He’d witnessed how humans could grieve bitterly, and then move on to find joy and love anew. In a mere five years, a man could replace even the most beloved wife with another that he loved differently, but deeply. This resilience was God’s gift to humanity, nothing short of a miracle, but it was a resilience that Castiel suspected angels did not share. In all his long life, Castiel had wanted only a handful of things–God’s love, the well-being of his garrison–and he wanted them eternally. Even now, with all the members of his garrison dead through his actions, his mind turned to them constantly. He thought about how he could have better cared for them, how he could have made them safe and happy, how he could have protected them from himself.  
  
He imagined the world a thousand years from now. The American Empire long fallen, its language split into a dozen mutually unintelligible offshoots, its vast highways abandoned, reclaimed by weeds and split by tree roots, as the Roman roads had been abandoned in ages past. He imagined the technology that modern men found so endlessly enchanting utterly forgotten, the clunky, ineffectual communication devices that he had never mastered set up in museums, as irrelevant as the astrolabe. And he imagined himself, in this new world, still desiring Dean’s smile, the crinkle around his eyes, the touch of his hands, with exactly the same acute specificity that he felt now. He imagined himself pining after a man who’d been dust for centuries.  
  
That was no good. He couldn’t bear it. No one could. There was a reason that he and Annael–who his human friends had known as Anna–had forbidden the members of the garrison to fraternize with mortals, and it hadn’t just been prudery and knee-jerk repression. He’d seen what happened to angels who fell in love with humans, and even when it ended well, it ended badly. Even now, more than one angel lingered in the human part of Heaven with its beloved, living the same tiny handful of moments over and over, century after century, millennium after millennium, unable or unwilling to resume the thread of its own life.  
  
The scale of human existence was simply incompatible with an angel. When Castiel thought about Dean, he found it hard to comprehend how any being that had existed so briefly–only 33 years–could achieve sentience at all, let alone develop the rich and intricate inner world that he knew Dean contained. The span of Dean’s life seemed to Castiel as cramped and tiny as the rooms that he and his brother spent their days in. Castiel’s true nature was too big to cram inside either one.  
  
And yet, countless angels had carried on sexual affairs with humans without destroying themselves. Some of them made a habit of it. One of his own garrison, Ramiel, had been infamous for the constant stream of women–and it was almost always women, regardless of the gender of his vessel–who kept him company when he was stationed on earth. Castiel had allowed it to pass, for the most part. Ramiel was a good soldier, clever and adaptive, in spite of his distractions. Indeed, Ramiel insisted that his human lovers made him better at his job. He said that they taught him subtleties of human culture he could never have understood on his own. At the time, Castiel had thought that was a rather thin excuse for self-indulgence, but at least Ramiel didn’t engage in the more contemptible forms of seduction used by some of the other angels. He’d never claimed that he was Zeus or Osiris or Thor, never told a girl that it was God’s will that she lie with him, never used his powers to overawe or coerce. He simply asked, and if she said no, then he went on his way.  
  
Every so often, someone new to the garrison would come to Castiel, and tell him earnestly in confidence that Ramiel had a human lover, as if this were a revelation. Then Castiel would have no choice but to call Ramiel back up to Heaven. Castiel was second-in-command, after Annael, making him, among other things, responsible for maintaining discipline. He didn’t truly care what Ramiel did, as long is it didn’t affect his service, but he had to put on a show. So he’d give a stern lecture about moral continence and emotional detachment, and then cut Ramiel out of operations for, say, the length of a human generation, leaving him behind in Heaven. It barely qualified as a slap on the wrist, but it inevitably upset Ramiel, who claimed to be heartbroken whenever he had to leave behind the girl of the moment. He would spend his decades of punishment lingering near Castiel, striving to suffer silently in the most obvious way possible.  
  
One time, Castiel, tired of this performance, pointed out that Ramiel would have left the woman after a year or two, whether Castiel intervened or not. “You think I leave them because I  _don’t_  love them?” Ramiel asked. That was exactly what Castiel thought. “Every one of their names is burned in my memory. Every one gives me the world made new again, through their eyes. And then we part before we can destroy each other. It’s the only way this works. If you keep a human from living a human life, you think she’ll thank you for it? I made that mistake once. I won’t make it again.”  
  
Castiel hadn’t seen Ramiel in a thousand years. When Heaven withdrew its remaining troops from earth, every member of the garrison rallied at Castiel’s call except Ramiel, who was nowhere to be found. Annael had wanted to look for him, concerned that he would be permanently locked out of Heaven.  
  
“He’s with his whores,” said Uriel. “Let him rot.”  
  
“He made his choice,” Castiel said. “We cannot delay.” The others didn’t look at Annael before they turned to leave. Even then, she’d already begun to withdraw into herself, leaving Castiel as the garrison’s true commander. She’d been gone a long time when she left.  
  
Ramiel had never reappeared. Not during the Apocalypse, or the civil war that followed, or the period after Castiel’s brief reign when the Leviathan were feeding on angels. He was almost certainly dead. And yet Castiel liked to picture him among the mortals of the twenty-first century, driving one of their cars, talking on one of their cell phones, a beautiful woman–and she would be beautiful, angels were endlessly fascinated by human beauty–sitting at his side.  
  
Castiel had come to believe that there might be value in Ramiel’s philosophy, but he feared that it was too late for him to imitate it. Certainly, it was too late to leave Dean. He’d tried that already, after Stull Cemetery, when Dean went off to live the ordinary life he’d always longed for. After resurrecting Sam, the last thing necessary for Dean’s happiness, Castiel had let him go. He’d even removed his hand print from Dean’s shoulder, a scar he’d grown to hate. It had been a constant reminder that he’d once seen Dean as little more than cattle to be branded, the end product of a centuries-long breeding program worthy of the barnyard. So he’d wiped the mark away, as an acknowledgment that Dean was a free man, not the property of the angels, or of Castiel, and then he’d turned his eyes toward Heaven. It hadn’t ended well for either one of them.  
  
Castiel still suspected that he was fundamentally harmful to Dean, that he was, as Ramiel had said, keeping him from living a human life. He knew how highly Dean prized what he called an “apple pie” existence, and how Dean’s failure to be “normal” according to his own standards ate at his self-worth. Castiel could never give Dean the things that Dean valued most. Still, he couldn’t make himself go, and Dean seemed unwilling, at least for now, to send him away.  
  
When Dean was gone, though, Castiel could take other lovers, as Ramiel had done. Find someone new, love him or her for a while, and then leave, while leaving was still conceivable, to find another. Perhaps he could survive that way, treating eternity like a relay race, always one step ahead of his grief. It might work, as long as he never looked back. As long as he never, ever stopped.  
  
But he didn’t really believe that he could do it. There was, perhaps, grace in Ramiel’s ability to love someone without needing to keep her, but if so, it was a grace that Castiel lacked. He could only love too much, or not at all. A series of lovers would mean nothing, or else he would break his own heart for them, over and over again. Neither possibility was enticing.  
  
Castiel didn’t know where that left him. He could die, of course. That was easy enough. Suicide would be unnecessary. He only needed to come out of hiding, and the angels who’d survived his mad reign as God and the predation of the Leviathans he’d released would take their revenge. But that seemed like a betrayal–the last thing Dean would want would be for his death to kill Castiel–and in truth, although Castiel felt that he should want to die, in the face of his unspeakable sins, he didn’t. It might be a moot point, anyway. There was something in the universe that seemed unwilling to allow him the mercy of a permanent death.  
  
He could do as Annael had done, and tear out his grace in order to be reborn as a mortal, but it was an option that he could never bring himself to seriously consider. To sacrifice his power was one thing, although it was like asking a human man to render himself blind and deaf, but he couldn’t give up a billion years of memories for the sake of one human lifetime. He was no snake to shed his skin so easily. He’d rather die as what he was, than live as the stranger he would turn himself into.  
  
The thread of consciousness that Castiel had attached to Dean tugged at him. He had no idea how long he’d been lost in thought, but it was long enough that Dean was concerned by his absence. Days, most likely. And still nothing was decided. For the first time in his life, time mattered, and it was running out. Even over the thousand miles that separated them, Castiel’s consciousness carried back to him the sound of Dean’s heart, its rhythm louder than the song of the whales and the din of the boats:  
  
Tic.  
  
Toc.

 

 


End file.
